The Scholastic Fallacy, Habitus, and Symbolic Violence: Pierre Bourdieu and the Prospects of Ideology Criticism

Aune, James Arnt

Western Journal of Communication, v75 n4 p429-433 2011

The scholastic fallacy consists above all in injecting "meta-" into discourses and practices. In addition to confusing research with politics, a specific way in which the scholastic fallacy can impair one's research is a tendency to divorce the mind from the body, with the latter seen as inferior. One competitor with ideology criticism, close reading simply ignored the fact that rhetoric is by bodies whose voice and gesture are essential to the production of meaning. Distance from commodity production, confused political judgment, and an overemphasis on the mind are but three aspects of the scholastic fallacy one needs to remember when analyzing the misery imposed on laboring bodies by economic and political structures. Specifically, one needs to keep the cognitive distortions imposed by one's social position--or what John Dewey and Kenneth Burke earlier called "occupational psychosis"--in discussing the relationship between structure and the human. Academics, Pierre Bourdieu points out, are fond of such oppositions as structure and agency because they are useful in generating theories and schools of thought that reinforce a sense of the "game," the "illusio" required to keep the academic enterprise going. In this paper, the author explicates the work of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as an important addition to the tradition of ideology criticism. In addition to encouraging greater self-reflexiveness about the conditions of the academic quest for symbolic capital, the Bourdieuian project with which the author identifies provides two important concepts for bringing ideology criticism forward: (1) "habitus"; and (2) "symbolic violence."